This policy brief shows how digital tools can help to ensure that public money for agricul-tural extension is spent wisely. Governments often fund offices, training centers, and the salaries of extension officers, but cannot eas-ily review the impacts of these expenditures. This is because the activities of extension agents are not monitored systematically. Ex-ension services rarely generate quantitative data on the effects of their work.
The need of Farmer Producer organizations (FPo) was felt to overcome the problems of unorganized small farmers who lack access to resources and services. FPos emerged as an interface between small farmers and the external world by providing forward and backward linkages, giving them required voice, market access, bargaining power, economy of scale and better prices. Among different tangible and intangible benefits, marketing related benefits like access to different market channels, decrease in risk, decrease in transaction cost, economy of scale etc.
Many initiatives to address contemporary complex challenges require the crossing of sector, domain, and level boundaries, which policy entrepreneurs are believed to facilitate. This study aims to enhance our understanding of how, why, and with what effect such entrepreneurs operate to cross boundaries. As this requires an account of both entrepreneurial strategy and the surrounding policy environment, we embed entrepreneurship in the policy frameworks of multiple streams, advocacy coalitions, and punctuated equilibrium.
This chapter tries to establish a connection between the low level of innovation and inventions in Africa and the absence of indigenous knowledge in teaching, learning and research across the continent. It starts by exploring the fundamental tenets of innovation and proceeds to look at the relationship between innovation and indigenous knowledge.
This paper explores how innovation becomes an increasingly important topic in international relations, with a deep impact on collaboration as well as on competition between countries. It analyses how certain key patterns of techno-economic change lead to changes in the global distribution of innovative activities around the world and how this affects the institutions for global governance. It outlines three near-future scenarios of the international politics of innovation
The drylands of the Global South are facing challenges from human population growth, unsustainable land-management practices, and climate change. Such problems are complex and can no longer be adequately addressed using traditional, top-down means. Rather, increased reliance on public participation is needed to better identify key research questions and interventions that promote positive change. Major actors in these approaches would include communities, applied researchers, outreach agents, policy makers, and planners working in tandem.
he European Union's long-term strategy for agricultural research and innovation was published in January 2016 following a year-long process of development, which included targeted consultations. Based on five priority areas, the strategy guides the programming of its main research and innovation programme – Horizon 2020 – not only for 2018 to 2020 but also for the period beyond 2020, to be covered by Horizon Europe.
Innovation processes in rural contexts occur in systems that are diverse, coupled with complex challenges. Dealing with complex systems requires an understanding of the social dynamics of actor networks and innovation.This study attempted to provide insights on thecompositional dynamics of actor networks,and how they influenceinteractive learning and innovation among agro-processing enterprises in South Africa. The guiding research questions to help address the study objectives are:What are the structural characteristics of actor networks for innovation in rural contexts?
There has been an increasing interest in science, technology and innovation policy studies in the topic of policy mixes. While earlier studies conceptualised policy mixes mainly in terms of combinations of instruments to support innovation, more recent literature extends the focus to how policy mixes can foster sustainability transitions.
Esta revisión de la literatura muestra la diversidad de puntos de vista en la caracterización del AIS (visión estructural, visión funcional, visión ba-sada en procesos, visión basada en capacidades). Estas diferentes visiones del AIS se basan en diferentes hipótesis y abarcan diferentes métodos de análisis del AIS. Los académicos consideran que estos puntos de vista son complementarios y útiles para una evaluación operativa del AIS. Debido a esta multiplicidad de puntos de vista analíticos, se ha desarrollado un gran número de métodos.